Dubai Day 2

After a busy day of meetings at Newsgroup, I couldn't resist stopping at the pool bar to shoot some pictures of the amazing sunset.

And there's nothing like 107 degrees outside to make a cold Stella the tastiest thing on earth.
And yes, the climate is very different. It's not a "dry" heat. Its a knock-you-off-your-feet heat. The only way I can describe it is to imagine what its like to come in from a day when its below zero outside and being plunked into your wood stove. The average temperature of an average room is about 65 and the temperature outside is 107. 

Back to business.

While so many measurement practices have crossed geographical boundaries, and the similarities between the folks at KDPaine & Partners and our colleagues at Salience,MediaWatch and Socialeyez outnumber the differences, There's a significant differences in the challenges they face. They take the concept of dedication to a whole new level. Sure, we have trouble geting to the office in a snow storm or a hurricane. But next time I'm whining about the weather, I'll think about the anlalyst in Libya who had to flee for his life, but still made it to an Internet cafe to send his clips back to MediaWatch in Dubai. Or the group of SocialEyez analysts who had to evacuate Cairo in the middle of the revolution, but when they got to Jordan were told they couldn't enter the country (titles with social media in them were a bit suspect at the time) , so they had to spend days in the Amman airport. Or an analyst in Afghanistan dodging IEDs on the way to work. It's also pretty amazing to think that these colleagues -- are located in 40 countries around the world. 

They also have some pretty high standards for customer service. They figure it takes two years to train a client service representative. And their standard, even with 700 clients, is to answer every single client query within two hours. And, even more amazing to this email-centric girl, it is mandatory to visit each client in person at least once a year. 

Wednesday morning after three days in hermetically sealed buildings I had to see what fresh air felt like, even thought it was 100 degree fresh air, so I was determined to go for a run.I headed out for a run around The Dubai Mall, largest in the world.
It took 40 minutes just to run around the outside. It's pretty much everything in this picture.  But more about the Mall in another post. 

But despite the heat and the lack of pedestrian-friendliness in the city, it's a great place to be working. It's like the early days of Silicon Valley, where there's an entrepreneur behind every desk, and everyone is just bubbling with ideas and innovations and new ways of doing things.

More as it happens.